Chapter
8:
The Marianas Trench: Naval Officer
Western Pacific, 1959-62
We think of earth’s plates colliding along the edges of continents, as
they do along the Pacific Coast of North and South America. But in
fact, some edges may be far inland, as they are in the Himalayas. Or
they may be far out to sea as they in the Pacific Ocean several
thousand miles east of Hong Kong, where the Pacific plate dives under
the Philippine plate. Parts of the Philippine plate have been forced to
the surface to form a series of islands called the Northern
Marianas--bitterly contested real estate during the second world war.
As the Pacific Plate goes down, it carries the ocean floor deeper and
deeper along a crescent-shaped arc. The northern horn of the arc points
toward Mongolia and southern horn toward the Philippines. Guam sits
about one-third of the way down, on the inside curve. Part of the arc
is the Marianas Trench, the deepest place on the earth, almost 36,000
feet down. The pressure at that depth is 8 tons per square inch.,
compared to sea level where it is about 14.7 pounds. If you put Mt.
Everest in the bottom of the trench and stood on top of it, you would
still have about 7,000 feet of water over your head.
__________
I joined the Navy in 1959. It might have been luck, but it felt like
destiny or at least like conspiracy. When I was about three, my mother
dressed me in a sailor suit and took a picture that Joanne still keeps
on display. Then when I was four, there was that ex-student of my
mothers who came strolling down the driveway, resplendent in Navy dress
whites. Later, one of my compelling memories is the first time I was
out of sight of land, when we crossed Lake Michigan on a ferry with my
mother. When I was 11 or 12, I devoured all three of Charles Nordhoff’s
novels about the H.M.S. Bounty mutiny and went on through a reasonable
number of C..S. Forester’s Hornblower novels, of which an
unreasonable number exist.
Of course I might have escaped the military altogether if I had been
able to get a draft deferment. I did try that, though without much
enthusiasm. First I interviewed with the CIA, who had approached the
head of Chemistry asking about seniors whose grades and skills might be
calling them to work at the margins of the field. I suspect my name
occurred to him pretty quickly. I was intrigued by the requirement that
recruits have “some knowledge of explosives and the ability to
communicate with small groups.” Their interviewer gave me an
application form as large as a small book, and I bogged down half-way
through. Besides the sheer tedium of the forms, I didn’t like the idea
of having a job so secret I could not share it with my wife, for I
never doubted I would be married to someone as soon as I could support
a family. I also interviewed with several defense-related companies,
where a job would have gotten me deferred. but all of the more
prestigious ones wisely turned me down, and I chose not to be one of
the herd that signed on with Boeing. I think I secretly rejoiced in
these failures because I wanted to join the Navy all along.
SIGNING UP--AND READING NIETZSCHE
When the Navy flew me to Seattle for the physical, I made a bee-line
for the piers near the seedy YMCA where the Navy put me up. That was
the first time I had seen the sea or, more important, smelled it or
heard it—that tangy odor of dead shellfish and ropes soaked in brine,
and the slap slap of the waves against the tar-coated pilings
underneath the boardwalks—but it confirmed my sense that I had made the
right decision.
Two other things happened on the trip that became part of my mind: I
bought a book by Nietzsche and I wrote a poem. The Nietzsche was
paperback edition of The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of
Morals. I picked it up purely on impulse, and I still have it,
inscribed in the flyleaf, “Seattle, April 1959.” I must have heard that
Nietzsche was a rebel and slightly disrespectable. Over the next 40
years or so I read the first thirty pages of The Birth of Tragedy a
dozen times. I know because those pages have my underlining in several
colors of ink. But sometime in 2004, I reread Thomas Mann’s Death in
Venice, in which Nietzsche’s treatment of Apollonian/ Dionysian themes
figures heavily, as does Plato’s theory of the soul in his Phaedrus.
The next fall I presented an academic paper on that topic at a regional
literary conference where I demonstrated to my own satisfaction that
much of the scholarship on Mann’s story was mistaken.
But more importantly--and more coherently--I told a story of how I
myself had lived for decades with an appalling simplified version the
Apollo-Dionysius contrast. I knew or surmised that Apollo is the Greek
god of (among other things) reason, Dionysius the god of wine and
intoxication. I thought or assumed that Nietzsche was making an
argument in support of the Dionysian intoxication as an antidote to a
culture deep in the thrall of Apollonian reason. That fit nicely with
my quest to liberate the world, beginning with myself. And so I had
lived from my early 20’s into my late 30’s with an image of myself as a
Dionysian rebel heroically struggling to liberate the world from the
grip of reason I was not sure then—and I’m not sure now--just how this
liberation was to proceed. On some level of my mind, I think it
had to do with feats of drunkenness and promiscuity. Of course I
was drunk far less than most of my friends and promiscuous only
tentatively and only in oriental seaports and never after I
married. Luckily my small-town, religious, middle-class
upbringing was enough to protect me from the worst ravages of my
philosophy, which otherwise would surely have damaged my life far more
than it did.
Working on an academic paper at the age of 66 and finally reading
Nietzsche’s essay all the way through, I realized that my bad moral
choices had been supported by bad reading, for in fact Nietzsche was
interested in Apollo not as the god of reason but as the god of song
and the plastic arts. Nietzsche’s point was not that culture needed
more intoxication but that Socrates had, with his emphasis on
logic, upset the delicate balance between Apollo and Dionysius achieved
by Aeschylus. So it turns out I cannot blame my mistakes on Nietzsche.
POETRY
Then, on my way back to the YMCA after dark, walking past an upscale
department store, clutching my Nietzsche in its little paper bag, I was
startled by a dark shape deep in the entryway. I slowed down long
enough to see it was a derelict and that he was surrounded by
handsomely dressed manikins, softly lit. The image stayed with me all
the way back to the YMCA, where I wrote my first real poem. The text is
mercifully long lost, but I remember one line: “huddled in a doorway
away from the wind, against a background of fine-dressed manikins . .
.” I think I remember the line because of the similar short “i” sounds
in “wind” and “manikins.” Later I would learn, at considerable
expense, to call that assonance.
I had been moved by verse since I was 8 or 9 when my mother read to me
from Robert Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses (“Oh how I love to go
up in a swing. up in the air so blue/ O think it the pleasantest thing/
that ever a child can do”) and from Eugene Field (“The
gingham dog and the calico cat/ side by side on the table sat”) I liked
the rhythm and rhyme, and I think that I could even sense in the
Stevenson poem how words could imitate the swoop and dip of a swing and
so embody the thing they were talking about.
Though I have not found my voice in poetry yet, I have never
stopped trying or felt I could stop even if I wanted to. For most of my
teaching career, I wrote a few lines at least once or twice a week and
I still do when I’m not traveling. Sometimes I inventory the events of
the day before and find a pregnant moment or image that seems
accessible to the pressure of language. If those lines fall into a
form, then the form opens a path down which I can continue for some
lines more, though not often to the end. Sometimes I try pouring an
emotion or observation into the form of a published poem from one of
the several collections I always have lying about my work table. That
seldom works, but it’s a good exercise, one I have often recommended to
my students, who generally felt it was cramping their originality.
Sometimes I examine the Bible verses I have read for that’s day’s
discipline and use that as an epigraph, summoning up some analogous
situation from my life. If nothing at all occurs, I open one of
the books on my desk and point my pencil randomly at a word, write the
letters of the word vertically down the page and use the letters as an
acrostic. That is often the most successful, thus confirming my general
suspicion that the less writers think about expressing themselves and
the more they think about technical problems of form the better the
results will be. Poetry is a formal art and most beginning writers
would write better poems if they were assigned a problem every day from
an impersonal source on the internet or took an assignment from a book
like The Practice of Poetry, by Bhen and Twichell.
But of course if there were such a site on the internet, no one would
open it because the motive of for poetry is not solving technical
problems but responding to a felt need for words to assume a shape
related to one’s experience. Shape is the key word, implying a kind of
physicality that is related theologically to the incarnation—the word
made flesh. Because of their line length (their most characteristic
feature), poems have a shape on the page, and even a careless oral
reading of a poem will—I believe-- respond to the line breaks. Shape
also manifests in the sounds of the words, particularly if they rhyme
but even if they do not—and, of course in the pattern of stressed and
unstressed syllables. I have studied prosody (the technical side of
poetry) pretty carefully—to the amazement of my students and even many
colleagues who sometimes seem irritated that such a thing as
prosody even exists.
But most widely published poets have studied prosody at some point, as
musicians have studied music theory, even if the goal in both
cases is to internalize it so well they no longer think about it. Form
is crucial. Dwelling on “content” always demonstrates a lack of
seriousness. It may have something to do with the iambic beat of
the human heart (ta, SHUSH, ta SHUSH)) and with the fact that sobbing
and laughter generally fall into a rhythm. Even if the impetus for a
poem is some poignant moment, the poem that gets finished has to
be carried forward on the back of form through much of the composition,
and many published poems begin as self-imposed assignments in form. I
know it may be the teacher in me talking, but I say that if a poem is
any good, it will at some point have been seen as a set of technical
problems to be solved.
That is not to say that the form is the “point.” The point for
me (and I would think for most who write) is a heightened state
of concentration and attentiveness in which we are aware of more than
we usually are. Usually when I write verse, I am aware of the same
thing as I am in writing fiction—of having crossed a line or having
entered a zone where the world suddenly opens out into a landscape more
dense than the one I was in a moment before, one that recedes to an
infinite distance and includes all the best moments of my past and the
best of whatever future I might have. To see the each thing in the
world as the potential subject for a poem seems to me a high and
satisfying calling, even if you cannot write those poems. You
could say it is a glimpse of Eden from which we came or a glimpse of
heaven to which it is said we are moving. Those who try to describe it
without theological terms are, it seems to me, being
unnecessarily inefficient.
NEW OFFICER ON THE BLOCK
And so, in December of 1959, I appeared on the quarterdeck of the EDSON
in my new uniform. I suppose I looked comic. People in uniform often do
until they have spent some time those clothes and learned not be
self-conscious about them. Before I was even assigned a job on the
ship, a young officer explained how crucial it was to have an apartment
in town and how he happened to have a line on one, needing only someone
to share it and split the cost. I did not see how I could say no.
Since he had a car, I did not have much choice except to go with him to
the officer’s club when the duty day ended at 3:30. There we sat on
stools at a bar and drank until 6 or 7. Then, as I remember, we would
drive out to the apartment which was on Ocean Boulevard just across the
highway from the Pacific Ocean. He would go off courting or drinking,
leaving me alone, half drunk and hungry. I would snack on cheese and
peanut butter sandwiches and read until I sobered up enough to go to
bed. He would come in around 2 or 3 in the morning, and the next day we
would drive out to the ship and do it all again. At the end a month of
that, I had such stomach cramps that my roommate had to take me to the
hospital ship in the middle of the night. I was still there a few days
later when my ship sailed out for the Western Pacific, so I had to make
a complicated journey by air to catch it in Guam.
The day after I reported, The Captain explained how my science training
fit well with the ship’s current need for a Damage Control Officer. I
would have preferred something in Communications, but I understood he
was not really offering me a choice. The Engineer Officer immediately
started sending me out on errands to the shipyard--to talk to people I
didn’t know about repairs I did not understand to machinery I had never
seen. I was overwhelmed and wanted to flee, but I plunged blindly
ahead.
When I was not running errands, I was sent down to trace the pipelines
in the four major engine spaces—two each for the boilers that made
steam at 1200 psi and 960 degrees Fahrenheit and sent to the other two
spaces that contained steam turbines to turn the propellers and smaller
turbines for the electric generators. There were miles of such pipes,
all wrapped in asbestos--not then known to be deadly. Besides the steam
pipes, there were pipes for the fuel oil, the lubricating oil, the
auxiliary steam, the condensate return. Each was labeled with stenciled
letters, but the lettering was already beginning to fade, even though
the ship had only been built a few months before, in Bath Iron Works,
near Portland, Maine.
As I traced the piping and began working with the machinery, I felt a
connection with the repairs I used to do—even fairly complex ones—to
the bicycles I rode around on the gravel streets of Ennis, Montana.
Looking back, I can draw out a theological point: Machines can be a way
to glimpse, if imperfectly, an unfallen world. Though they are designed
by fallen human beings and though friction is a kind of original sin,
nevertheless, machines do work as well as they are designed to work.
When inept people complain about machines not liking them, they know
they are making a joke. They know that when machines break, they break
for good reason—because of poor design, or because they have been
mistreated, or because they are worn out.
People, of course, are a different matter. People know their health
will suffer if they get fat, but they get fat anyway. People know they
will be miserable if they cheat on their spouses, but they cheat
anyway. People know they will suffer if they procrastinate but they
procrastinate anyway. They know it’s depressing to gripe about things
you can’t change, but they do it anyway. I tried to work with this
insight in a story called “Guardian of the Shrine.” It’s about a young
Navy officer who loses the key to the main bearing housing. This is how
I describe the gears:
The gears are in a case about the size
of a small cottage. They take the power from the steam turbines, which
have thousands of blades--each about as big as a rose petal and almost
as delicate--and transfer it to the main shafts which are the size of
trees. The shafts turn the big 7-foot propellers that drive a 2700 ton
ship through the water at 27 knots.
The gears are amazing. Each one is machined from a single piece of
high-carbon steel shaped like a dumb-bell with unequal ends. The gears
are machined into each enlarged end. The smaller circumference at one
end receives the speed from the turbine and passes it on to the larger
circumference of the other end which turns at a slower speed and makes
up the difference in power. It's magic the way it works, but it's
physics too. If something is turning, then the bigger it is, the slower
the outer edge has to move. At the equator you're traveling a thousand
miles an hour, and at the north pole, you're standing still, but you're
standing on the same planet. It's the same way with gears. On each
gear, the circumference of the small end turns fast and the
circumference of the big end turns slow. The speed has to go somewhere,
so it goes into power. Speed to power, speed to power, all the way
through the system. That’s the system I’ve lost to key to.
As it turns out, the key was stolen by a young seaman in the officer’s
division, whose wife was divorcing him. Because they were in the
Philippine Sea, the officer had had to refuse the seaman’s request to
return to the states to recover his marriage. The officer finally
deduced that the sailor could have stolen the key to sabotage the gears
as an act of revenge. He races to the engine room and, sure enough,
finds the sailor squatting beside the gear housing, staring through one
of the inspection ports. But it turns out the sailor had borrowed the
key just to look into the unfallen world of machines where things can
be designed to work and actually do. When the officer questions him,
the sailor says:
It's hard to explain, Sir. I guess I
just wanted to look at something that runs the way it's supposed to
run, something that isn't fucked up. I thought if I just looked at it
long enough, I could believe in something and it would be all right. I
can handle it if I can believe in something, believe that there’s
something in the world that isn't fucked up.
When the officer asks if the sailor is going to be all right, the
sailor says:
Sure, I've seen enough. I know it will
be there. I can remember it now. Whenever I need it, I can just think
of the gears in there, turning and turning, smooth and perfect, and the
oil running down on each place they touch, just like it's supposed to.
It will like I had x-ray eyes or something. I can just look into my
mind’s eye and see them, right through the housing. I'll be fine.
SETTLING IN
When I got to Guam to catch my ship, I found I was witness for the
first time to an historical event. At one of the piers, there was cigar
shaped cylinder. When I asked around, I found it was a bathescape
called the Trieste, which means sad in French, though I never
discovered a connection. The Trieste had been towed to Guam to make a
historic dive into the Marianas Trench. It did that on Jan. 20, 1960,
only days after we had left Guam for the next port of call. The
two men on board the Trieste were a navy LT, Donald Walsh and Jacques
Piccard the French explorer, whose father had invented the bathescape.
My official title was Damage Control Officer. That meant I was in
charge of the auxiliary machinery on the ship—everything that was not
directly related to the ship’s propulsion: the toilets, the showers,
the drinking fountains, the refrigerators and freezers that stored the
ship’s food, the steering engines, the lights, the heat, the internal
communication systems, even the tiny little motors that circulated hot
water through the pipes so when you turned the hot water spigot you
immediately got hot water. The air conditioning was a special bugaboo.
I learned to hate air conditioning and still will suffer for a long
time rather than turn it on in my own house.
In wartime, I was supposed to control the damage sustained in battle.
My station was a cramped office deep amidships. During battle drills, I
wore ingeniously designed sound-powered headphones and stood in front
of a magnificent set of wall charts which showed all the compartments
of the ship in many perspectives. Each of the hundreds of compartments
on board was numbered according to a code that told how far down it was
from the top, how far port or starboard from the centerline, and how
many feet it was from the bow. In drills, I would be handed slips of
paper saying that a compartment with such and such a number was flooded
or on fire or both. I was supposed to instantly identify the
compartment, make decisions, and issue orders to crews posted deep in
other parts of the ship.
An inclinometer on the wall told us how many degrees we were listing to
the side. In case we were hit, I was to do elaborate calculations and
enter the results on a graph. When one line on the graph crossed
another, the case was hopeless and I was to call the bridge on my
sound-powered phone and tell the captain we should abandon ship. Only
the Damage Control Officer was authorized to advise the captain to
abandon ship. I was 22 years old. Before I came on board, I had been an
indifferent student of chemistry at a state university and the author
of an insipid column in the college newspaper. I don't think I have
ever felt more ridiculous than I did in my sound-powered phones,
standing in front of those wall charts, being handed slips of paper
with mock damage information made up by people from another ship who
had come over on ropes and pulleys to design these drills for us. A
slip of paper might say, "You have taken a shell below the water line
in compartment 3-42-117. You are taking on water at 4700 gallons per
minute. The water is causing a class C fire in the electrical
equipment."
There wasn't much I could do but call my crew closest to the disaster
and tell them to go have a look. I never had the slightest doubt that
in an actual battle, the phones would not work, the crews would have
all already been gassed, the leak would smash its way from one
"watertight" compartment to another, I would never get the information
I needed to make my neat calculations, I would never be able to tell
the captain when to abandon ship and we would all die messy, terrible,
uncalculated deaths, like rats in a hole.
Gradually and painfully, I worked out a set management tools, massively
expanding the simple planning I did in college to get my homework done
on time. I began carrying a pocket notebook in which I wrote down
every non-routine task I was assigned or could think of. In another
part of the notebook, I wrote down every phone number I called, until
at the end of three years I could pass on to my replacement an
invaluable list of numbers of shipyard liaison officers and other
bureaucrats who were useful in getting machinery fixed.
Every morning after breakfast, I folded a fresh sheet of paper
into a size I could carry in my shirt pocket where the notebook was. On
one part I wrote a list of things to tell my division at quarters, a
brief assembly every ship has everyday at 0800. On another
section, I wrote a list of tasks I could reasonably accomplish
that day, taken off the master list in my pocket notebook. During the
day when I was not on watch, I would work my way from one end of the
ship to the other through the spaces I was assigned, making myself
accessible for dozens of impromptu conferences a day. When I came
to the mess hall admidships, I would take out my sheet of paper,
flatten it out on the cooler that kept the ice cream, look over the
lists of chosen tasks and choose one to work on. I have done some
variation on that routine ever since, except when I travel. When, much
later, I looked at the expensive pre-printed day planners, they seemed
drab and restrictive beside the flexible and variegated systems I
devise myself.
Sometimes, the tasks seemed too much. I remember one particularly
grueling inspection where the captain wanted me to send enlisted men
down to scrub the bilges by hand. The bilges are the v-shaped spaces at
the bottom of the ship, covered by grids of decking that form the floor
of the engine spaces. They fill with oily water that drips from the
machines. You can pump them periodically, but they are never clean and
dry and no reasonable inspection would have insisted they be so.
My chief petty officer thought the request was unreasonable. I agreed
but said we had to do it anyway. When I pressed him, he walked out of
my stateroom. Technically, I could have had him court martialed for
insubordination, but that would have been a huge distraction and
might not have stuck anyway. I was in despair the whole afternoon,
incredulous that the rest of the ship’s crew could be going calmly
about their business when my mental life was in shreds. I don’t
remember how it turned out. Probably there was some sort of compromise,
but if we had failed the inspection, I think I would have remembered.
At times like that, I would fantasize walking off the ship, getting
into my Volkswagon that was parked at the end of the pier, driving
through the gate, on out through the city, into the desert in the
general vicinity of Las Vegas where I would check into a cheap motel
and call the naval authorities, who would take me away to be court
martialed for being absent without leave. Perhaps I might be sent for a
psychological evaluation. A psychiatrist might talk to me in a quiet
room with a comfortable chair. The ultimate result would be disastrous,
but at least for a little while I would no longer be responsible for
things that were beyond my control. The fantasy never took over,
obviously, but it grew strong enough that I still have some sympathy
for people--like Macbeth--whose obsessions create scenarios so
compelling that they suddenly find themselves living in them.
Over time, it got a better. As crew members came and went, I became the
old hand so that when something went wrong, I could sometimes remember
how we fixed it before and actually make helpful suggestions.
There were moments of deep satisfaction, even triumph. When
I was watching my crew repair machinery deep in the bowels of the
ship, late at night, helping them pour over intelligently written
technical manuals, helping them draw replacement parts out of the
ingeniously organized storerooms, I felt drawn into a camaraderie with
men that I am not sure I have ever felt since.
In another moment in Yokouska, Japan, I was inside our main
condenser—they are big as a large bathroom—looking for a bad tube so we
could plug it and sail out the next morning. In there with me was
little Japanese man who had been chief engineer on a Japanese
battle ship in WWII. At my request, the shipyard had sent him over to
help. I suppose he was indirectly responsible for the deaths of
hundreds of Americans, but that night we were only two men—one old, one
young--trying to solve a technical problem and get a ship
underway. When we found the bad tube at about 3 a.m., we grinned
and shook hands. He stayed on board while we got up steam and
waved to us from the pier as we pulled away, on time.
BACK IN SCHOOL
After a couple of years, I was promoted to Engineer Officer with a
Damage Control Officer working for me. My main job then became
attending to the ship’s propulsion machinery. To prepare for that, they
sent me to Engineering School in San Diego. That school lasted several
months, perhaps even three.
I had gone earlier to ship-handling school there, and I loved both
those assignments. The officers’ quarters were shabby old dorms
sleeping two-to-a-room, but comfortable. The mess (dining room) and
officers’ club (drinking room) were a short stroll away. There was a
black and white TV in a mournful lounge, where I watched the
Kennedy-Nixon debates in 1960 and came to the conclusion that the
primary qualification for any candidate for anything was a sense of
humor. I may have still voted for Nixon out of habit, but my conversion
to the Democratic party had begun and got another boost at Kennedy’s
inaugural. It was not the famous line about asking not what your
country can do for you that got me, it was another passage where he
talks about the “long twilight struggle knowing neither victory nor
defeat.” That was a struggle I knew pretty well and any president who
could work it into his inaugural was going to get my heart and
eventually my vote.
We started classes at 8:30 and were done by 3:30. The work was not hard
(I don’t remember doing homework), and there was plenty of free time.
Many weekends I drove by myself north to Ocean or Mission Beach with a
blanket and book and spent the afternoon sunning, reading, and
body-surfing. I thought I might meet girls there, but I never did.
Instead I met them through a singles club for women who wanted to meet
Navy Officers. They called themselves The Bacherlorettes. I dated one
girl—heavily freckled across the shoulders I remember—who cooked me
dinner and introduced me to Liebfraumilch. She later tried to contact
me through a friend, and I suddenly realized she would have married me
if I had asked her. In those days at least, many girls would get
married if you asked them. I sent her a lei from Hawaii, but I was not
interested in falling in love, let alone settling down. I had a girl
half-waiting for me in Montana and whether that worked out or not, I
was interested in seeing the world and to do that, I had to travel
light.
In San Diego, I found a kindred
soul attending another school in San Diego at the same time. We
struck up a friendship based on a love for reading and the ability to
find pleasure in something besides drinking in the officers’ club. The
difference was, that he really could read. His name was Jack Kuntz. He
had studied to be a Jesuit, even taken the vows. Then, at the last
minute, he felt called back into the world and had been released from
his vows (by the Pope, I remember, and was quite impressed) to join the
navy and attend Officer Training School. He knew languages, including
Greek, and he seemed to have read everything. Except for my mother, he
was the first well-read person I had met who was not an atheist or
skeptic. Books seemed for him to actually have some connection to life.
He read the Bible, which was for me a dark and preposterous book. He
knew by heart passages of Tennessee Williams. He talked as if it really
mattered what Tennessee Williams had imagined someone saying in Night of the Iguana. For me this
was something new.
It turned out that Jack was the communications officer on the
PICKERING, a ship in our squadron, and so we were able to keep up the
friendship after our schools ended. We went to movies, explored some
non-digital dating services ("three phone numbers for ten dollars") and
found them nearly as dismal as the most people find the current
versions. Jack and I even traveled together to San Francisco to visit
his aunt and uncle, who was a physician. Everyone who came to San
Francisco in the 1960's fell in love with it--its water, its bridges,
the peculiar style of neo-Victorian architecture adapted to the hilly
terrain. Whole hillsides, covered with houses pained in pastel colors,
glow at sunset, their windows flashing golden light. The doctor's
clinical schedule as demanding, but the household rhythm seemed to flow
in and around his work with no sense of panic or even improvisation. I
don't know that I had ever stayed in a home quite so gracious--not
luxurious, but gracious, with a sense of ease and courtesy that had
something--but not everything--to do with money. I didn't know people
could live like that, and i took it as an ideal that I was only able to
approach after I married Joanne. Jack's relatives found us blind dates
and we saw Bob Newhart, long before he was famous, at the Purple Onion,
long before it was famous.
Jack and I had a lot to talk about. I had read my way
through War and Peace and had
taken a correspondence course in writing from the University of
Chicago:
the feedback was not encouraging. I had written poetry, all
of it
bad. In a photograph of my stateroom I can see
that I wedged books into the vertical girders on the bulkhead by my bed
tightly enough so they would not fall out when the ship rolled and
pitched at sea. One of those books was always T.S. Eliot’s Collected
Poetry, that my future wife had given me as a graduation present
from
college. I had glued a scrap of the brown and cream gift-wrap into the
back cover and it is still there. I was drawn to bleakly modernist
novels, like Aldous Huxley’s Chrome
Yellow, and I remember reading
Oedipus at Colonus beside the
pool at the officer’s club, looking over
the edges of my book at the young families splashing in the water.
In one of my books, I had across a quote from W.H. Auden that has
never left me: “We are all trying to spell God with the wrong alphabet
blocks.” I can remember sitting in the wardroom eating dinner after I
read those words, my head spinning with the thought (which I wrote
down) that there were people--like Auden, like Eliot--smart people, who
at some point in their life wanted to believe in God but could
not, whose lack of faith did not feel to them a triumph but
rather a great sadness. I vaguely realized how inefficient and wasteful
all my agnostic struggling was, how much easier it would be to fall
into faith and pull round my shoulders like an old shawl language and
concepts that had been worked out for 5,000 years or so. I was like a
person in the wilderness, living on grubs and berries when just a few
yards away was a tidy house with the table set and a fire in the
fireplace, that I would not enter because the house would not be
my own, and originality was more important than truth.
Jack and I stayed up late on many
nights
talking about books and ideas and life. He told me about Juliana of
Norwich, the 14th century mystic and the first women to write English
which has survived. She was called naive and worse for declaring that
"All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will
be well." Of course I was skeptical. "Come on," I said, "the century
she wrote those words, the plague killed a third of the people in
Europe. Where does she get off?" But Jack just laughed. "If she could
believe it then," he said. "All the more reason for us to believe it
now."
GOD STILL DOES NOT EXIST
Jack's faith seemed to run at a depth that made my sophomoric
meanderings
seem flimsy and jury-rigged, but I could not imagine giving them up. I
even have a journal entry, written in the back-slanted hand I used in
those days, entitled “Why I Do Not Believe in God.” I list six reasons.
Two of them are different ways of saying Christianity can’t be true
because there are other religions that serve other people very well.
This objection shows up on every apologist’s list of Standard
Objections and gets a Standard Answer. But I can seldom remember the
Standard Answer and have to fall back on the first answer I can
remember, which was C.S. Lewis’, who pointed out that scripture says
Jesus came to save everyone, but that He has many ways of doing that,
many of which we cannot know about it. Lewis said that wherever a
Buddhist prays with particular ardor, we can be assured that Jesus
responds to that prayer.
In another Lewis passage I remember well, from one of the late books in
the Narnia series, Aslan talks about one of the followers of the
demonic deity Tash, one who had behaved with uncommon decency toward
Aslan’s followers. Aslan’s answer is that whenever someone who
professes loyalty to Tash demonstrates that loyalty with uncommon
valor, then the valor accrues to Aslan. Likewise, whenever someone who
professes loyalty to Aslan does so in careless and indifferent ways,
the carelessness and indifference accrues to Tash.
Three of the statements have to do with science, for example that
“every answer religion provides can be provided by another means.” I do
list an exception: “the concept of religious experience.” The sixth is
“unanswered prayer.” The whole thing is awkwardly phrased and there are
a couple of spelling errors. Not exactly the titanic atheism of a
Bertrand Russell. In fact, pathetic.
The issue, however, seems to have been explanatory power, as if God and
science were competing in a quiz show. I do not list any particular
questions, nor can I recall any. If the question had been, “why is
there order in the universe,” then, yes, Darwinian naturalism does
offer an explanation, though some evolutionary biologists believe in
God. If the question had been “What is the purpose of life? ,” the
implicit answer, I suppose, would be “To experience as much pleasure as
possible,” an answer I would not have accepted on the grounds that none
the people we honor seem to have lived by that code.
Fundamentally, I was assuming that both systems had equal explanatory
power, and that I was choosing science as more compatible with the
modern world as it revealed itself in the most easily accessible
sources—in the newspapers and in the gossip of my friends. I thought I
had arrived at The Truth, but in fact, I was making an “arbitrary”
choice, or, to put it another way, a basic assumption. Mrs. McCollom’s
geometry class had it right—you cannot prove anything unless you assume
something.
Both geometry and belief involve leaps that must always feel both
arbitrary and inevitable at the same time. When it comes to basic world
views, you can stand on one side of the chasm or you can stand on the
other, but you cannot straddle the fence forever, or—when you think
about it--even for an instant. You can analyze religion in terms of
science, or you can analyze science in terms of religion, but you
cannot analyze them both from some third point of view. How we choose
might involve mystery, or destiny or luck, but still feels like a
choice.
STANDING WATCH
The other thing I did on a ship, besides attend to my machines, was
stand watch. All the officers were expected to qualify as Officer of
the Deck, in port and at sea. In port was easy enough. All we had to do
was stay on board that particular day and tend to any administrative
matters that came up after the rest of the crew had gone ashore. The
OOD had to be sure that the boatswain sounded the various hours, from
reveille (“Now up all hands. Sweep down all decks ladders and
passageways. The smoking lamp is lit in all berthing spaces. Reveille,
reveille”) through to taps (“Taps, taps. All hands keep silence about
the decks. Sweep down all decks, ladders and passageways. Empty all
trash receptacles over the fantail. The smoking lamp is extinguished in
all berthing spaces. Taps. Taps.”). The OOD had to received a report
every night from the various departments (gunnery, operations,
engineering, supply) which by tradition were called “eight o’clock
reports” even though they were delivered at 20 hundred hours
according to the 24 hour clock that governed everything else we did.
There were pieces of military nonsense one could stumble over, of
course. One Sunday afternoon when we were anchored, the captain, whose
name was Collins, came aboard from one of his regular drinking bouts
and demanded that the OOD be sent to his cabin at once. When I showed
up he slurred his way through a long discourse on how I had disgraced
the ship by allowing some breach of protocol on the bridge. I was to
stand out there until I saw what it was and correct it. I stood out
there for a sorry two hours inspecting every hawser and line until he
finally roused himself and told me that the ensign (a blue flag with
white stars that flies from the short staff at the prow when the ship
is anchored) was upside down—that is, with the two bottom points of
each five-pointed star pointing up rather than down. I probably would
never have made a career in the Navy anyway, but whenever I considered
it, I remembered those two hours of unnecessary humiliation and the man
who could not say simply “Slanger, the ensign is upside down. Have
someone fix it.”
I have not entirely forgiven him yet, though my heart softened a little
when I saw him expertly maneuvering the ship at night in shallow waters
off the coat of Formosa, when we were dropping off some Navy frogmen
during an exercise. Using only a radar screen with a seaman beside him
relaying depth soundings from our SONAR crew, he took us within a few
yards of shore, often with less than a dozen feet of water under the
keel. It irritated me that a man who was a drunk and bully could also
be vastly competent in one narrow but crucial area. I thought morality
and competence should be better connected, but I had to conclude that
gifts are dispersed mysteriously, if not quite randomly. Still, C.S.
Lewis says somewhere that virtue, even attempted virtue clarifies and
vice induces confusion, Captain Collins would have been even more
competent if had been kinder.
Standing watch at sea was a different affair. That was called driving
the ship. There were always two officers on watch, a Senior Watch
Officer (SWO) and the Junior Watch Officer (JWO). One or the other had
the “con”—authority to actually give orders to the helmsman. There you
felt at the heart of things, helping the ship do what it was designed
to do, part of a tradition that went back into prehistory.
Operating independently on the high seas in calm weather was
exhilarating. There was a walkway around the bridge, exposed to the
sea, where you could stand and watch the horizon cut across the rising
or setting sun like a razor. The ship purred through the water in a
dead calm or rose and fell in gentle swales. Porpoises would sometimes
swim alongside us, leaping out of the water in graceful arcs. They
would do this 20 minutes or more, long enough for the boatswain to
announce over the loudspeaker (called the 1MC) “porpoises off the port
bow.” Then work would stop so sailors could come topside to stand by
the rail, watching, and no one would talk. When I was not on watch, I
would go (at night, when no one saw) and lie down in the bow, which was
so sharply undercut that if you lay down and pushed your head a
little out under the railing, you felt you were flying above the twin
white waves made by the bow as it cut through the water.
Or I would sit on one of the hawsers on the fantail and watch the wake
churned up by the huge twin screws. Anyone who has done that has
thought how easy it would be to lower oneself into that wake and let
go. They would not miss you until 8:00 the next morning, too late to
think about going back to even look. It’s a wonder more people don’t do
it. In my bad moments, I certainly thought about it. I even have a
melodramatic note in my files dated Jan. 11, 1962. Written in that same
back-slanted hand, it says:
As I stand here at the rail, about to
kill myself, I find myself unable to decide which of two reasons stands
uppermost or if indeed they are one and the same. Because I feel myself
unworthy to continue living or because I cannot stand my environment.
Yes, they are the same, for my environment is myself and I cannot
tolerate it because of my unworthiness and my failure.
DARKNESS--AND A WAY OUT
Unworthiness. Later, working on Theodore Roethke, I found a better name
for it: contamination. For Roethke, and for most people, this meant a
sense of being contaminated, unclean, fallen. That would be bad enough,
like the Li’l Abner cartoon character Joe Btfsplk. who perpetually
walked around under his personal raincloud. But what I felt was
something more serious: the sense of being a contaminant, of being a
stain, a blot on the world, as if my own fallenness were dragging the
world down with me, as if I were spreading unhappiness and revulsion
wherever I went, as if the world would be cleansed if did not have to
put up with me, as if I owed the world my death as recompense for
having put up with me all these years.
It seems useless to speculate about where such feelings come from. We
are told that feelings of self-worth generally are the result of loving
parents. But surely not always. My relationship with my father was far
from perfect, as these pages have made clear, but his difficulties
hardly seem enough to account for my own. There is always the plea of
chemical imbalance, but that is a medical will ‘o the wisp or perhaps
even an invention of the drug industry. To the extent it exists, it is
probably a symptom, not a cause. I suspect that serotonin uptake may
well prove to be the same thing, though I am grateful for the relief
the Zoloft brought to people I love.
In any case, the search for causes of unhappiness in family
relationships is not always productive. I wonder if it is ever is. We
do not need to know the source of mental pain in order to treat it.
Though Freud is a great writer, classical Freudian analysis has been a
blind alley, has it not? There are many ways into mental pain and many
ways out, but my own experience suggests that meaning—significance
revealed in verbal constructs—can be a way out, even when it has not
been a way in, or when the way in is obscure.
Tom Cruise, the movie actor, is currently in the news for having
criticized one of his fellow actors for taking anti-depressants,
implying that she would have been better off with his own source of
mental health, Scientology. Scientology is probably as bogus as a thing
with a name can be, but even Tom Cruise can be right if he means that
attitudes can influence mental health. And if you start asking where
attitudes come from, it is very slippery slope to ideas, spiritual
outlooks, worldviews, and even religious convictions.
My own release from episodes of mental torment was coincident with my
conversion because it allowed me to think of mental suffering as sin. I
know that labeling mental suffering as sin must seem like a monstrous
strategy to those for whom sin is already a bizarre category. It has at
times seemed so to me. But sin was the first word that had ever made
sense of my mental pain. It was the first word that ever authenticated
what I felt, that had ever put it in a larger pattern and provided a
way out. That is, when I was in an episode, a voice inside my head was
crying out, “You are a no good son of a bitch.” All that secular
therapies offered me was another voice, equally shrill, saying, “No,
you are a fine fellow.” The best I could do, then, was listen in my
head to child’s silly argument: ‘You’re bad.” “No you’re not.” “Yes,
you are,” “No, you’re not.” Forever.
The concept of sin cut through that by suddenly interjecting another
voice, that said “Well, of course you are a no-good-son-of-a bitch.
Everyone is. Did you think the book of Genesis was just a child’s
story?” Later I figured out that even on days when we didn’t feel like
no-good-sons-a-bitches, we still were, just by virtue of our membership
in a human race that has been tormenting each other in every corner of
the planet since we began making stone tools. The point is that we are
something besides a no-good-sons-a-bitches. In fact, we are not
essentially no-good, we are essentially made in the image of God. We
are messed up in ways that are not altogether our fault but in ways for
which we must take responsibility, and the way we do that is first of
all by confessing our sin, not denying it, and then by accepting the
love of the deity that made us in the image of Himself. That does not
end our sin, but it puts us back on our feet. It does not make us a
victor, but it puts us back in the fight, back into that long twilight
struggle that Kennedy had spoken about.
SHIPBOARD ROUTINE
Even storms were more exiting than frightening. The bow would nose into
the green water below the foam of each wave, and the water would come
flooding over the deck six or eight inches deep and moving fast enough
to wash you overboard if you didn’t cling fast to the railing.
Sometimes the waves would be high enough so green water would crash
over the bridge against the thick glass that protected the wheelhouse.
If you stepped out on the wing to check a bearing on a compass, your
face would be covered by sea water, whose the peculiar smell and taste
you can never forget. That smell haunts me yet. When we were in San
Diego in the summer of 2004 for the reunion of the Edson crew, I wept
when our plane turned inland and I could no longer see the ocean.
Our destroyer--larger by a third than the WWII models we operated
with—weighed 2700 tons and was 418 feet long. It could take a
mile to stop and half a mile to turn, so every move had to be
anticipated well ahead of time. When we were operating by
ourselves on the open sea, this was no problem, but often we
operated in formation with several other destroyers, sometimes in a
protective circle around an aircraft carrier. In those cases, turns had
be coordinated by radio or semaphore or signal light. At sea, there are
no roads and no landmarks; the view is the same in every direction.
Imagine driving your car across a flat surface with no roads and no
identifying landmarks, using only a compass, with a half dozen other
cars crossing your path at speeds and courses you do not know.
There was an ingenious device called a maneuvering board to help out—a
plexiglass circle about eight inches in diameter that could be rotated
inside a larger piece of plastic. Like the periodic chart from my
chemistry days, it was iconic—compact, dense and powerful. You marked
on it with grease pencil, using parallel rulers and a dividers to
indicate the course and speed of two ships, one of them your own. It
mechanically did problems in vector analysis, but you did not have to
understand the principle to get it to work. If a ship was approaching,
you could find out how close you would come to it and take evasive
action if necessary. Or if you were in formation with other ships and
whole formation turned, you used it to find out the course and speed
you needed to get to the same position relative to the other ships.
Behind the pilot house was a radar room where people did the problem on
their board while we worked it out on ours, and we didn’t make a turn
until we agreed. If someone got it wrong, ships could collide and
people could be killed. It happened once when a sister ship, the
PICKERING, failed to make a turn and the carrier sliced into her,
canting her front one-third off at a 30 degree angle. No one died in
that case, and we towed her into the Philippines for repair. By the
time I got out of the Navy, I found I was visualizing a maneuvering
board in my head as I was passing cars on the highway in my 1960
Volkswagon. I assume the thing is done digitally now.
But even with a maneuvering board, operating with other ships was a
bewildering and chaotic situation, especially at night, when the other
ships were a myriad of red and green lights—green if you could see
their starboard side, red if you could see their port side. Your sense
of how things were developing was fragile, like a bubble. If it all
dissolved into chaos, you were said to have “lost the bubble.” I was
always on the verge of losing the bubble and it showed. The captain
could see I was not a natural at this work and kindly arranged to send
me to ship handling school in San Diego. That helped, but I never felt
comfortable when things got hairy, and someone more experienced always
took the con.
In October of 1962, not long before I was scheduled to be discharged,
the EDSON was sent to San Francisco on a good will mission. Tony
Bennett had just released "I Left my Heart in San Francisco" and it
played over and over in the officers' club where we drank one night
away. Then suddenly we were ordered to take on a full load of food and
fuel and get underway for the Panama Canal. We did that, working all
the second night. I am not sure if at that point we even knew why, only
that something serious was afoot. But we still had one night before he
left, so our resident officer with a knack for these things managed to
get us a bevy of stewardesses to invite us to their apartment in
Redmund. Nothing untoward happened--just a quiet evening of
dancing to vinyl records and laughing in the unspoken acknowledgment
that we were young, that we would probably never see each other again
and that we might all be killed. The next morning, I was down in the
engine room at my appointed post when we sailed under The Golden Gate
Bridge, but I am told those girls were standing on the bridge, waving
underwear at our ship as it sailed out. I am forever grateful for that
gesture.
NAVY: SUMMING UP
The EDSON was decommissioned in 1988 and wound up as part of the
Intrepid Air and Space Museum in New York City, along with a an air
craft carrier, The USS INTREPID, and a submarine, the USS GROWLER. I
visited her in 2003 when I was in New York City with Joanne and with
our son Brian, his girlfriend, and Marc. On a cold April morning, Brian
and I walked from our hotel on The Avenue of the Americas west to pier
84 on the East River. Brian put a mic on me and followed me through the
ship with a video camera shooting footage that he then edited into a
video, a nice piece of work as usual. It was surreal, seeing the ship
through a lens of 41 years. It had become an icon in my mind, something
artificial, a link I had forged in the chain of my life, When the gray
iron reality of the ship ran up against my memory, I felt like it was
the reality that had to give way.
Sometimes it did: when I visited with the caretakers about what I
remembered, I could establish that the structure really had changed—for
example, that the open bridge had been removed so all the piloting was
later done from behind glass. Or what had been the machine shop had
been converted into a small museum that openly proclaimed what had been
only a whispered secret in my time—that “Red Mike” Edson, the Marine
Colonel for whom the ship was named, a hero at the battle of
Guadalcanal, died by his own hand in the garage next to his home in
Washingnton, D.C., in 1955, at the age of 58.
Within the last few years, the EDSON was removed from the
Intrepid Museum and put in mothballs in Philadelphia. Both Sheboygan,
WI, and Saginaw, MI, would like to buy the EDSON and open her up as a
floating museum. Both are trying to raise millions of dollars and work
through the monumental paperwork that would require. One group has
prepared a 1615 page proposal that is being reviewed. If either group
succeeds, and if I live long enough,
I will find a way to see her again, especially if she winds up on
Saginaw, where I can ask around to see if anyone there remembers
anything
about their native son, Theodore Roethke, the mad poet who would later
lead me down paths that were more literary but no more productive than
the EDSON.
My three years aboard the EDSON affected me as much as any three years
in my life. Friends who served with me on the ship find it hard to
understand how I can say that. For them, their military service is like
a forgotten dream. But for me, it is constantly present. With just the
slightest effort I can recall the feel of the ladder going down into
the engine spaces, the recessed handles on the closets and drawers in
my stateroom, the heat that rose up from the boiler room into my
mattress, the shriek of the telephone beside my bed, the curved couch
in the wardroom where the single officers would watch Soupy Sales on
television, the polished handles on the levers that closed the
watertight doors, the wide-legged stance I used to walk down the
passageways when the seas were rough, the light brown haze that came
from the stack when the boilers were working properly, and the sick
feeling in my stomach when I saw the smoke turn black or white.
Incredibly, I can say that the Navy made more difference in my life
than did my eight years of college. If I had somehow not gone to
college, I would probably have become more or less the kind of person I
am now: bookish, reserved, tongue-tied in small groups, accommodating,
curious: on a good day, Scrooge’s clerk, Bob Cratchit, and on a bad
day, Prufrock: “deferential, glad to be of use . . . full of high
sentence and bit obtuse.”
When I got out of the Navy, I had a set of management skills I would
use forever and I had whatever confidence I was going to have, which is
not much but a lot more than I otherwise would have had.
When I was tapped twice--out of the blue--to chair academic
departments, I knew I could do that work. Probably the deans who tapped
me knew it too. I had traveled to exotic places, I had navigated
the Navy bureaucracy alone, all the way from Long Beach to Guam. Though
I felt like a boy—hardly less so at the end than the beginning—I had
been treated like a man, given more responsibility than I ever thought
I could handle. I had bent from the pressure--sometimes double--but I
had not broken.
When Joanne and I attended the EDSON reunion in San Diego in
2004, I wept when I saw Jesus Trevino’s name on the list of those
attending. When I knew him, he was a Boiler Tender Second Class. Like
me, he was a little bewildered by the complexities of our steam system,
high-tech for its time. But he was always present, always willing to
learn, always ready to do the best he could. When we saw each other at
the reunion, we embraced. He made chief and went on to a long
career with five tours to Viet Nam. We still correspond. He says he is
going to drive to North Dakota to see me, and I hope he does.